Episode 20: Regime change in Iran? What the 1979 revolution can teach us.

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 640 Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Twenty-four people have been killed in Israel since the outbreak of the direct Israel-Iran war. The Air Force is busy hunting launchers inside Iran to constrain Iran's ability to fire missiles at Israeli cities. Parts of Tehran are being evacuated as Israel continues to hunt down the IRGC leadership and demolish the country's nuclear program.

But enormous questions remain unanswered. Can Israel actually destroy the nuclear program all by itself? If it can't, and America doesn't join the airstrikes, then what's the goal? Could Israel be hoping to achieve regime change?

We raise these questions and others, and then pay a short visit to the 1979 revolution that felled the oppressive Shah in a vast uprising by nearly all parts of Iranian society - and was then taken over and subverted by Khomeini into the theocracy we're still dealing with today. What does that historical perspective tell us about the Iranian regime's staying power?

This episode is sponsored by an anonymous donor who dedicated it to the incredible female lone soldiers of the IDF hailing from Silver Spring, Maryland.

If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [email protected].

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everybody. Welcome to Ask Kaviv Anything. This is an update from the war. My usual background is gone.
0:12.9	My home office has been dismantled because we put it together in the bomb shelter in our apartment.
0:20.0	And that bomb shelter is now a place where my four kids have slept for four nights because we have been woken up once or twice each night as missiles from Iran head to our area.
0:33.3	There have been a couple dozen pieces of broken up missiles that have fallen within a couple of kilometers of our homes.
0:41.0	So even when the missiles are intercepted, there are dangers.
0:44.9	Iranian missiles have already killed at least one person that I know of from pieces of an intercepted missile falling from a very high altitude after carrying a great deal of momentum when it is hit
0:57.8	by an Israeli interceptor. So it's been, I'm exhausted. It's, it's been sleepless nights and
1:07.8	being happy for the kids and trying to be involved and being there with neighbors
1:14.0	and all of that. But I wanted to come to you now, not so much with a news update on the war,
1:22.1	because, you know, you're getting that from all the internet. There are now, I believe, 27 dead in Israel from the
1:30.2	missiles that Iran is lobbying at our cities. There are many, many more than that, an order of
1:35.8	magnitude, more than that, wounded. And this isn't going to end soon. And so what I wanted to try and give was a perspective, a perspective that is rooted in
1:48.5	history about what Israel can achieve in this war with its current strategy, as I understand it,
1:55.2	what it maybe can't, and how it's trying to navigate those possibilities and those potentialities available
2:03.6	to it.
2:04.6	So let's dive into it, but before we dive into it, I want to tell you that this episode
2:10.6	is dedicated by an anonymous sponsor from Silver Spring, Maryland, to the incredible female lone soldiers of the IDF.
2:20.3	These are young women who, without their parents, come to Israel to serve and to protect us all and to protect my kids.
2:28.3	I actually had a conversation a couple of nights ago with my teenage son who doesn't feel, because teenagers are courageous, it's a very unhealthy thing.
2:38.0	Like he should run to the bomb shelter when the siren sounds.
2:44.0	He feels like that's a kind of surrender to the enemy. The enemy is trying to terrorize, and his job is not to be terrorized. I love that response
2:53.6	profoundly, but I also need him in the bomb shelter. So I told him about the soldiers, but all of them.
	...

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